Category Archives: Film

The heady days of 15-20 posts in a month — our usual target — are gone. It’s been a steady, sad decline these last few months. But take heart, this is usually how it goes for semi-personal blogs, er, I mean, websites. And that’s just how it goes for the Same Page Team. We tried our best.

And so we have it now: Wonder Woman, the film built around the third of DC’s classic trio of characters (along with Batman and Superman). It’s the first of its kind, and already marked as a success (after a $100 million opening weekend), which of course suggests a bright future for more. But, as with its male-led predecessors: is this necessarily a good thing?

There’s a lot of beautiful work here, put together by top-notch artists, and yet Alien: Covenant plays out like one long odd choice. The talent makes it work thankfully, but it still feels unnecessary.

Who’s worked with the best the most often, but never been individually recognized? Who’s the best supporting supporting actor? Welcome to the Same Page Team’s hunt for the best supporting supporting actor!

e’ve decided to take a classic movie conundrum and turn it into a little game, enlisting several of our contributors to participate. We’ve all done it before. You turn on a recommended movie, or the hit TV show du jours and you see an actor. You’ve seen them before, but you can’t remember where. ‘Who IS that?’ you ask yourself. You find yourself furiously searching IMDB pages, trying to learn his or her identity.

Of all the on-the-nose elements of Logan my favourite happens early on. After an intro involving a band of carjackers and a rudely awoken Logan — one in which we see exactly how far this film is willing to go with its violence — we get a calm meeting with an incoming villain. Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a so-called Reaver, with one robotic hand and a southern accent, explains that he needs Logan’s help to find a missing girl. The evil intent here is obvious, but Donald’s speech ends with a pleasant summation of why this film even exists. As he gets out of the car, Donald tells Wolverine, one of the most enduring and popular characters of the past 30 years: “I’m a fan.”

That’s the first of many problems with Kong: Skull Island—the tone is completely off from that of Godzilla. Sure, as directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, there are moments of action and suspense similar to Edwards’ flick, but the tone of this film jumps up and down like a kangaroo in a bouncy castle. How can these two films cross over successfully when one is so starkly serious and the other so ludicrously flippant?

As the tension in Get Out, the debut film from writer/director Jordan Peele, gradually mounts, my mind couldn’t help but recall the horror of America’s most recent election night. As the votes were counted and Donald Trump’s victory assured, noted Twitter user Myles Brown said of the result: “You scared? Don’t know who to trust? Feel like you’re surrounded? Congrats. You’ve been a minority for like an hour.”

If the Academy Awards were trying to conceive of a way to stay interesting, to keep atop the social media conversation, there were worse ways to do it. Believe me, they’ve tried — even elsewhere on last night’s broadcast. Thanks to a stunning last second reversal in the Best Picture category, everyone is talking about the Oscars this morning. There’s a lot to unpack here. (Not least of which: How did Warren Beatty end up with an Oscar in his hand as he retook the mic in the show’s final moments?) And look at that, we’ve largely set aside the award show’s more, uh, problematic elements.